There is an old joke motif the origin of which is obscure (to me, perhaps you can inform us): A highly technical, or perhaps mundanely boring, or perhaps very formal or conventional thing … a police report, the new HR guidebook for a large company, the manual for your new programmable graphing calculator … is being discussed, and someone suggests doing it as an “interpretive dance.” I know I first heard that joke a very long tie ago. Since it probably predates Wikipedia, it is unlikely that we will ever know who first used this theme.

An aptamer is a molecular tool that is used to find, grab, affect through contact, a particular tiny thing, like another molecule (but even perhaps a whole cell or even a tiny organism). The process of probing around in the microscopic world for research, engineering proteins or molecular interactions, pharmacology, etc. might use aptamer molecules in a number of different ways. The trick with using aptamers is to find them either from natural sources (rare) or from a large pool of diverse semi-randomly tossed together molecules. A method used to put a large number of different candidate molecules to the test in order to identify an aptamer for a particular tiny thing (like a bit of DNA, for instance) is SELEX.

The SELEX method is complex, perhaps even boring, and certainly has the potential of becoming mundane to Maureen McKeague, who has developed a SELEX for targeting homocysteine. So, let’s see how Maureen does this in the form of Interpretive Dance! And since the target molecule is a HOMOcysteine, we hope and expect there will be a homo-erotic aspect to the performance.